The thing with HubSpot is, it's not easy for SMS app partners (like us) to link as a channel to a conversation inbox. Now, we're working on it, but in the meantime we're using Email to SMS to get around the problem.
In this article, we'll show you how to trigger an email to send to the HubSpot inbox email address whenever a reply to an SMS sent from the inbox is received. This solution won't work for replies to SMS messages sent from contact profiles or workflows.
Follow These Steps:
1. Start by going to Conversations, then Inbox, then Inbox settings:
2. Click the Actions button in the top right, then select Create new inbox:
3. Give your new inbox a name and click Next in the bottom right:
4. Choose the channel you want to connect. In this case, it should be Team email:
5. Select the option for a shared account in the next screen:
6. In the account connection screen, select Other mail account to allow for email forwarding:
7. Choose the "from name" settings and then make a note of the inbox email address. You'll need this in a moment. You should also create a signature, using "{end}" as the signature itself. This is an SMS end tag and will make sure that and emails converted to SMS will cut off at the end of the email message (and not include any pre-configured disclaimers).
8. Click Next, and then decide what assignment settings you want to use:
9. If you didn't copy your inbox email address in step 7, do it now, then click Connect & finish in the bottom right of the screen
10. Log in to your Sinch MessageMedia account in the Sinch MessageMedia web portal, and go to Settings > Numbers & Channels > Settings > Email to SMS and then click Update.
11. In the Allowed email addresses and domains section, click Add:
12. Paste in the email address of your new HubSpot inbox and click Add:
Preparing your contacts for Email to SMS
Now that you have your Email to SMS inbox set up, you'll now need to create a workflow to populate existing and new contact profiles with an E2S email address. Here's how you do it:
1. In the HubSpot main menu, go to Workflows, then click Create workflow, to start building a contact-based workflow:
2. Set your enrolment trigger as either the mobile phone number or the phone number being known:
3. Create an action to send a webhook using the following configuration:
Method: POST
Webhook URL: automation.hubspot.integrations.messagemedia.io/webhook/contact/add-secondary-email
Authentication Type: Include request signature in header
HubSpot App ID: 218459
4. Click Review and publish in the top right, and then select the option to enrol existing contacts who meet the workflow criteria:
5. Click Turn on in the top right to activate your workflow.
Once you've activated the workflow, the system will retrospectively populate all existing contacts' secondary email field with an Email to SMS address (e.g. 61412345678@e2s.messagemedia.com), using either the data in the contact's "mobile phone number" or "phone number" field. (To learn more about the logic that HubSpot uses when validating phone numbers, read this article.)
And there you go. Whenever you send an SMS to a contact from the inbox (using their Email to SMS (E2S) address as the destination), you'll see any replies appear in the conversation inbox.